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Comment by sopooneo | Hacker News Reader

Why are Ivey grads so valuable to these financial institutes? It seems like if they wanted general smarts and abilities, there would be better filters. Like STEM grads from across the top universities. My suspicion is that it is partly about brand name. That is, these companies have an easier time selling a fund if they can say it is managed entirely by people with Harvard/Princeton/Yale degrees.

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They do get engineering grads from other schools, to do the derivatives pricing and programming. Something like 48% of MIT grads went to Wall Street during the 2000s. Considering the dearth of academic positions, it's one of the only places for surplus EE, math and physics PhDs can even get a reasonable job.

In regards to Ivy Schools, they are generally ranked top 10 in most non-engineering subjects in the USA, including math, physics and economics. An Ivy grad is a reasonable guarantee that you are getting top class talent.

it is entirely about brand name. add to your example the strengthening of ties within the old-boys ivy league network. it's perfectly rational - if you're them do you take the smart kid from the university of connecticut who comes from a modest background and is on in-state tuition or the smart kid from yale who, chances are, is related to a congressman, corp executive, or, if you're lucky, a saudi prince. kind of a no-brainer if your business is based largely on relationships and protected largely by class barriers.

come to think of it, why is everyone on here so concerned with 'killing hollywood' lately? we should be killing the too-big-to-fail financial institutions.

Big institutions threaten to create a drag on todays economy, Hollywood threaten our entire society by threatening freedom of speech for their own short term selfish gains. All it takes is one government to use them as an excuse to censor and become a dictatorship and it could do magnitudes more damage to society and the economy than the finance industry ever could

Corruption between the two could be a driver to seek that dictatorship however...

It is most likely about signaling (branding as you say). For example, by bringing young, good looking consultants, you are using prestige pressure to force a certain strategy. Most of what they have to say is fairly trivial, and anyone with decent analysis skills could do it, but that's not why there are there (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/rob...).

I think the same kind of signaling is used at its fullest in big banks investment dpts. In most cases, what is actually done by e.g. quants is far from very sophisticated mathematically speaking. But you can more easily claim that what you do is complicated if most of your quants are from prestigious institutions. Having everyone coming from a similar set of cultural values also helps cohesion.

Top management at the world's corporations need someone to take the blame when their decisions don't work out. So, what do they do? They hire a analyst or consultant from a consulting firm or financial institution for x hundreds of dollars per hour. But they can't just hire anybody, they need the "best" available. Otherwise their judgement could be questions if they hired some nobody. The consultant or analyst really don't do anything that any business undergrad could do or that the execs themselves could do, just some basic presentations and charts. They are essentially business whipping boys (and girls). Brand is very important for these types of jobs as you can imagine.

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